Cawfee tawk

BL: ... so I figured we should all get back into fighting form, it being a new decade and all.

RA: I think I should start doing some martial arts training.

BL: Maybe you should

RA: Ok, I shouldn't do too much grappling though, my stomach muscles are pretty tender these days...

Me: Maybe don't mention that to your classmates in fighting on the first day, how about waiting until the 4th or 5th class so they don't just start whaling on you from day one?

Ramon is dangling his arms onto the floor, despairing with his forehead to a stool.

RC: I don't feel like doing anything. I don't care anymore. This is how I prefer existence sometimes, like yeah my heads down.

BL: Uh, could you guys run out and get us some more sage? We burnt the rest of that bundle up after you started playing with a ouija board and tarot cards in the house. Also when we burned that necronomicon we found in the laundry room. So we're going to need some to smudge the rest of this year outta here. Especially if you keep talking like this.

RC: I can't move. Andrea wants her private time, she wants the space to herself tonight.

Brenda Lee wistfully imagines the concept of private time, and having her own space. She resolves to at least start the new year and decade with fresh beats and phenomenal music.

Brothers continue to mope around and sigh.

Jeanne enters.

JNM: I woke up next door to the Playboy mansion! Ohmagawd! And I lost my phone!!

Friendship and Zucchini Bread

At the end of a long stretch of holiday engagements, social obligations and drinking binges, my friend Jen and I caught up with each other for a couple of days during her visit to Chicago this Christmas. The last thing we wanted to do was hit up our neighborhood hipster bars and go out drinking - she was still recovering from an epic Christmas hangover, and I was in no better shape from a whiskey fueled high school reunion over the weekend. Time for us to detox a little and take it easy.

Chicago has been locked in an arctic freeze and covered with snow since last week, so it was pretty clear that we weren't going to skateboard downtown or go on a long bike ride. We've always bonded over food, so I figured the best way to spend our short amount of time together would be to come in from the cold and hang out in my kitchen in our socks around a warm oven. Between the busyness of our past couple of weeks, we planned our intense baking session.

Jen's vegan, and has been influencing my eating habits for the better in the many years that I've known her. We'd feed ourselves between extreme adventures on wheels, and I learned how to transit out of a thoughtless processed food lifestyle with fresher and more natural alternatives. Introducing good healthy food into your diet reaps exponential benefits for your life all around. We work hard and play hard physically - the ability to cycle dozens of miles every day, and skate a bowl for hours upon hours demands that you eat your vitamins.

In some sub-zero windy moments rushing around during the holidays, I daydreamed about this zucchini bread we would be baking. It would be savory enough to keep it from becoming just another annoyingly cloying pastry. The delicate flavor of the squash would bake so nicely and keep the bread moist, while the cinnamon and nutmeg would make my house glow with the smell of spices. I'd cut it into slices and toast them, and offset the warm chewiness of the zucchini bread with a drizzle of almond butter. Yum!

Jen came over and set up her music player to trade music with me while we prepped and got the ingredients in place for our project. We caught up on each other's states of minds, as we've done many times during our hangout sessions throughout the years - from cabin rooftops in Colorado where we splayed out in a valley inhabited by a she-bear, to alleyway gardens in Lincoln Park in the summertime - we've shared so many exquisite brief pauses in the chaotic tornadoes of our everyday existences and treated ourselves to a few fine things that have made those moments even more delightful. This very thing is truly what these holidays are supposed to be about, and I felt so fortunate to have caught up with Jen before she headed back to Denver.

There is not a more wholesome and honest way to spend time with a friend. I believe that baking is a wildly creative endeavor, an alchemy of passion. We zoned out on the work it took to grate the zucchini and put love into mixing the sugar and the spices. Here is the recipe that we followed. It's made with applesauce and flaxseeds, and simple enough that we could put absolute care into every ingredient.

We triumphed in our efforts and swooned over the outcome, as we knew we would. The almond butter on toasted zucchini bread slices was as amazing as I imagined it would be, especially with some vanilla soymilk. Like many divine things that manifest into my life I finally understood that I had dreamt it to ensure it would become real, because it was going to be so fantastic.

Is this thing on???

Demetrio, an old family friend, invited me onto his radio show at WHPK in Hyde Park after we traded a few stories earlier this year. His show, Chicago is the World, broadcasts on Tuesday and Thursday evenings at 5PM CST and can be listened to on the internet at WHPK's stream.

As filipinos born in Chicago, we share similar perspectives on the experience of traveling back to our families in our parent's islands. They make for some humorous, poignant, and sometimes tragic moments, some of which I had the pleasure to share on the air yesterday.

I was so excited to visit this legendary radio station, and to be beckoned by the University of Chicago's gothic archways for the second time in a month. The history of hip hop and house music in Chicago evolved in that studio. Generations of underage backpackers found new beats and styles the old school way, ears glued to boomboxes with raised antennas like a true music head.

A long time before music blogs and internet streams, access to the best recordings hiding in the niches of culture could only come from programming from stations. I always learned something new from listening to WHPK. So many rappers, djs, and musicians passed through there, and so much great music has been brought into the public ear through those broadcasts.

In a world in which the rest of the dial plays such trite, predictable and generic music that my ears weep, I find these microbroadcasts and small pockets of innovative and thoughtful programming to be a heroic effort. It is a sanctuary of brilliant cuts, a treasure chest full of jewels of songs, rare and excellent.



Through these decades of music, the station has accumulated a vast library of records. The station is a music lover's dream.



We discussed an issue close to my heart, the plight of migrant workers from the Philippines who leave the country to enter a world in which they often have no basic human rights. Demetrio played an amazing set of music, from Balkan beats to Colombian electro music. I can honestly say I had a phenomenal time during my visit to WHPK and was honored to have been invited, as I exited to an amazing dub set.